Domain of One’s Own – Initial MiddCreate Conversation

Yesterday we had our first group meeting revisiting where we wanted MiddCreate to go. That’s one of my main projects so I was facilitating the meeting. It was a bit odd to start a big project like this over Zoom but I think it went ok. I set up a Google Doc as a way to get the conversation going and provide us with a bit of structure. I’m basing this post of the notes I took during the conversation but will undoubtably skew it so hopefully some other participants will weigh in. Consider all this a really early rough draft. That’s why you see some unfinished lists.

I would love to see how other people have thought this through so if you’ve done anything remotely similar throw a link in the comments.¹ If you decide to do anything similar please link it. If you just want to comment on this, please do it. Do it here in the comments so the ideas don’t drift away in a stream of tweets about Tony Hawk and the royal family. It’ll be like the web was back in the day. Comments and trackbacks. Won’t that be nice?

There are three main questions and we agreed to look at them through a few different constituent groups- students, faculty/staff, and DLINQ itself. There’s a decent amount of overlap between the goals for these groups but there are also some key differences. One piece that did come up was the idea of organizations using MiddCreate. We have to think those through differently because they will take up seats but are unlikely to move on. They’re like faculty/staff in that way. Not an exciting consideration but one that will impact cost in the long term and impacts how we provision those accounts. You don’t want to tie an organization to a student email and then have some system tied into their graduation move that account from Middlebury to private.

As was brought up in the meeting these kinds of projects are complex because they’re a bunch of overlapping complex things. You have a technology infrastructure and your group knowledge of it and how it might support your larger goals. At that same time you’re

What does a successful MiddCreate look like?

²
This is old begin-with-the-end-in-mind pattern. We need a rough idea where we are heading. We can and should dream big. Aspirational is good. No point in aiming for bland.

For Students

Students vary quite a bit from the College to the Institute but for these considerations we see them as people who will leave Middlebury after a relatively short number of years.

• We want students making informed choices about the provided tools. If virtually everyone is choosing WordPress there’s not much point in taking on the additional cPanel overhead. It’s fine if the majority end up on WordPress but it should be a considered choice.
• Students understand today’s exploitative social-media-platform patterns and use MiddCreate as a way to get the same or more value without giving up content, data etc.
• Students use MiddCreate to construct a digital identity with intent and a thorough understanding of the risks and benefits.
• Students gain digital fluency.³
• DLINQ programming for students leads them to MiddCreate and MiddCreate leads them to student programming. MiddCreate becomes the place where students put what they’ve learning in the Crypto Party workshops etc. into practice. MiddCreate and its documentation leads students to participate in various workshops that help them understand and take better advantage of the options available on MiddCreate.
• We see a community being formed that is active and vibrant.

For Faculty/Staff

The line between faculty and staff is blurry and likely exclusionary in a way we don’t want so consider that forward slash to be joining the groups rather than separating them. These are people who work at Middlebury and will be here for an unknown amount of time.

• MiddCreate solves problems for faculty that normal IT services can’t. Those problems may be related to teaching, digital scholarship, or anything else that they need.
• Using MiddCreate increases digital fluency for faculty.
• Faculty make creative and unique learning spaces that represent their own personality, programs, and learning objectives.
• Faculty perspectives on how projects grow and change over time shift to allow more tolerance for the unknown, more interest in iterative processes, more tolerance for “messy” patterns.
• Faculty use MiddCreate to support their work in project based learning, lab learning, community engaged learning, and public-facing conversations about their disciplines.
• Faculty use MiddCreate to take intentional risks.
• Faculty use MiddCreate to create active communities of learning.
• Faculty understand when and why they’d want to use MiddCreate.

For Us (DLINQ)

• MiddCreate is known and promoted as valuable option for meeting faculty needs by the library, CTLR, ITS etc.
• MiddCreate is well known and promoted internal to Middlebury
• We have a diverse and growing set of examples aligned to major College, Institute, and DLINQ themes
• Middcreate programming/documentation⁴ and DLINQ programming are so connected that they connected people in a cycle of synergistic magic.
• Communication to the broader community about MiddCreate is frequent and interesting.
• MiddCreate is indexed so that it can be found using the Middlebury site search function.
• We practice what we preach in terms of accessibility, data privacy, analysis of outside services etc.
• Increase our own understanding of tools and options.
• Robust tool options, templates, and documentation within MiddCreate that reflect our other major initiatives.

How will we know that MiddCreate is going well?

For Students

• We figure out a way to see installs of various tools across MiddCreate. Trials, experiments are encouraged so we likely want to see that a thing was tried (and deleted) rather than looking at what exists at a given point in time.⁵ We also have to give students a way to opt out of this data collection. It may be that the more people who do this, the better we’ve done talking about privacy.
• Talking to and surveying the students. We’ll need to consider whether this means just those using MiddCreate or if we’ll try to get a larger sample.
• Having students choose to opt in to a recognition system.
• Participation increases.
• Students decide to transfer their domain when they graduate.
• Workshop participation increases.

For Faculty/Staff

• Participation increases in MiddCreate and workshops
• MiddCreate becomes an integral part of the curriculum.
• Faculty/staff sites have a wide variety of purposes and use a variety of tools.
• Projects grow and mature.
• We see repeats (one project, leads to another, leads to another).
• People find out by word of mouth.

For Us

• We see things that excite and interest us regularly.
• Our roles in projects change over time towards less
• We are not burdened by support.
• The community helps support itself.
• We get surprised (in a good way) by what students/faculty/staff have done.
• Our support role matures as people engage with us.

What do we need to create that kind of success?

For Students

• Show powerful examples with context as part of the initial sign up process.

For Faculty/Staff

• Address the fear of the unknown.
• Show powerful examples with context to help shape understanding.

For Us

• Improve partnerships with ITS, CTLR, the library etc.
• Become more efficient in terms of systems. Fix the things we know are causing problems and eating up time so we can spend more time on human things.